Shadow Shadow

Roger Weingarten’s sixth book, Shadow Shadow, is a rare achievement by a powerful poet. Weingarten writes with a dark and wry humor, and his voice, fine and masterful, inspires as it surprises and startles. Shadow Shadow shows life lived at the edge of meaning, drawing transcendence from the darkness, the shade of the extraordinary at the edge of the ordinary.

In Shadow Shadow memories of family and growing up revolve and collide with the very tangible present in bold violence that sends out precious spikes of pure emotion and precise truth. Weingarten’s vibrant, strong verse deftly shapes moments of ordinary life – a letter received, an old tombstone visited, a night’s bad dream – and then remolds these familiarities with an undeniable craft and a relentless eye for the affirmations of life that only accomplished art can provide.

“The pyrotechnics of Weingarten’s verbal horseplay are sprayed against a sinister and starless sky, and we realize that this is a poet who speaks to his demons in the language of demons. . . gallows humor to make the bones of Lenny Bruce ratlle in their box.”
—Richard Katrovas, Three Rivers Poetry Journal

“One cannot simply read the poems of Roger Weingarten: to enter this book is to be caught in swift currents of language that flow as forcefully and naturally as whitewater rapids. Accommodationg both psychedelic workplay and hilarious, offbeat allusions, as well as a forthright, healthy sentimentality and straightforward, gutsy speech, Shadow Shadow’s got spunk, personality,and, like good rhythm and blues, it’s got soul.”
—The Virginia Quarterly Review

Roger Weingarten has published ten poetry collections and co-edited seven anthologies. He was involved in the establishment of the MFA in Writing and the Postgraduate Writers’ Conference at Vermont College and taught there from 1980 to 2008. He has also taught at many other colleges, universities, and writers’ conferences around the country. He has received numerous awards for his poetry, including a Pushcart Prize, a Louisville Review Poetry Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, and an Ingram Merill Foundation Award in Literature.